Birds of a Feather
The Graverunners knew their enemy, and had a plan: they went to the trusty scrying pool outside of Skyport to get intel about the Sanguine Queen. They saw her trapped in an obsidian cavern -- which Goro recognized from Morgan Wyn's nightmare -- two of her ten identical red heads still bound by heavy chains to the inside of the volcano, but the other eight freed by apparent mining efforts chiseling out the hooks she was once chained to. With this information, they set to work strategizing on ways to take her down while hopefully saving Red Wyn, and had the idea of also scrying on Ysra, Morgan's partner who stabbed her in the back, but seemed to think he was doing it for her own good. They located his bones in a similar volcanic cavern, among the apparent remains of the Queen's meals, and considered using Speak With Dead to question him at a later date. While they were talking, there was a sudden crack outside, followed by a thump. Roddy rushed outside, Jasper close behind, while Larkin implored them to just look out a window and not charge wildly into the unknown for once. What they charged into was Jonn -- badly injured and carrying a cracked staff of teleportation that had gotten him to the Runners. After Luci healed him, he told them that his and Finch's cover had been blown, and Finch had fled to their new safehouse under the remains of the Grumpy Sausage, while Jonn had come to ask Larkin for help. After some suspicion and double-checking to be sure that Jonn was neither lying nor had been tricked himself, the gang just Sent at Finch and confirmed the story with him directly. Then they set off to save him. As promised, they found him wounded and hiding. Larkin and Jasper went down into the cellar while Raef, Roddy, and Goro kept watch, and Finch explained that he had several chests worth of stolen gold and one of intel gathered on the Sanguines. Up above, however, Goro spotted red-clothed people stealthily closing in on them from every direction, and called down a warning. Jasper grabbed a chest of gold, Larkin grabbed the intel, and the group made a run for it. Larkin, Jasper, and Raef were quick and sneaky enough to evade the Sanguines, but Roddy, Goro, and Finch weren't so lucky. As Larkin turned back to help her friends, they made a hasty plan -- Goro created an illusory duplicate to cause a distraction, giving himself time to flee and giving Roddy a chance to Alter Self into a fake Sanguine and grab Finch, claiming to have gotten him. Unfortunately, his act wasn't quite good enough, and the real Sanguines kept closing in. Roddy thought fast and cracked away, taking Finch with him. The gang met up at the Basha warehouse, where there was a tunnel leading through the undercity to Mishka's estate -- they figured they could lose any trailing Sanguines on the way. They met Bretta at the warehouse and asked her to come along for safety, then descended into the depths. When a cave-in forced them to detour, they ended up in a part of the city previously frequented by the Skyport Thieves, now used as a dumping ground for the bodies of those who betrayed Morgan Wyn. At the top of the open mass grave, they saw Gwydion. Raef recovered his misguided son's body and carried him out of the undercity to bury him at Mishka's estate, where the Runners were finally safe. Everyone got healed up and regrouped, and decided what to do next: Hansel, Luci, Jonn, and Bretta would take Kheman to Shepherd Hills, where Dread Jones would have no way of finding him, while Jasper, Roddy, Larkin, Goro, Raef, and Mishka would head for Moorland, where Finch had learned that Larkin had a lost aunt who would soon be targeted by the Sanguines and needed saving. Once Mishka had located a teleportation circle in Moorland, he would collect Hansel (and probably Luci and Jonn) and take them to meet with the rest at Sienna Springs -- -- for the final confrontation with the Sanguine Queen. On the way out of Skyport, however, the gang ran into one final surprise. A harried, dragon-bit Morgan Wyn tracked them down and was relieved to see them safe -- she'd learned that Blue had planned to trap and kill them, and tried to intervene. Upon realizing that she had been betrayed and fully replaced as the head of her guild and was now powerless and obsolete, Red snapped, killed her pseudodragon, and defected, throwing her lot in with the Runners. She would accompany them to Moorland and to Sienna Springs, to kill the Queen, regardless of what it meant would happen to her. Category:Session Recaps